The country seems to be going absolutely nowhere. The failure of the major parties to agree on future course of action has now precluded the possibility of election by April/May. The Election Commission has been vacated after its deadline to the government to clear the hurdles to polls passed, unheeded, last Wednesday. By the looks of things, Nepal might be headed for many more years of transition politics, with nothing less than the country’s existence as a viable state on the line. By all indications, it is already close to a failed state status. The ruling Maoist-Madhesi coalition has to share most of the blame for the current mess. Despite its failure to salvage the old CA and to hold the self-declared polls on Nov 22, it stays put, conveniently batting away all calls to make way for national consensus government. We harbor no illusion: So long as the current coalition is in place, there can be no breakthrough.
As we have consistently maintained over the past few months, Bhattarai must make way to create an atmosphere of trust between the ruling and opposition parties. In his one and a half years as prime minister, Bhattarai has been steadily squandering his political capital, both among the common people as well as the broader political class. A prime minister who started out with massive public backing is now widely recognized as among the most discredited heads of the government in the country’s democratic history. It is strange that the opposition is being asked to join the current government, a government which has lost all its moral and constitutional legitimacy. There is no getting around it.
The Bhattarai government has to make way, preferably for a Nepali Congress-led government, failing which the option of a neutral candidate to head the next government might be explored—but not before there is genuine commitment from the ruling coalition that it is sincere about the option. There is real fear among the opposition and a growing section of the intelligentsia that if the opposition accedes to the demand of a third candidate, the Maoist-Madhesi coalition will simply raise yet another obstacle to the formation of a new government. The ruling coalition has been claiming that if the opposition gets government leadership, there will be no election. But more and more, it appears that it is the ruling coalition, not opposition parties, which is shying away from election.
This may be the reason Maoist Chairman Dahal has started to push for a revival of the dissolved CA. The Maoists are worried about their electoral prospects post-split, and the Madhesi parties unsure of their standing in the Tarai after their long, controversial stints in government. Thus the ruling Federal Democratic Republican Alliance, the argument goes, will do everything it can do delay polls. If this is indeed the alliance’s plan, it is taking the country on a dangerous course. Timely elections are the lifeblood of a democracy. If this process is hindered, the space for undemocratic and regressive elements will expand. But the ruling coalition seems unbothered. We see the new Maoist proposal of CA revival as yet another delaying tactic. The CA is gone because it could not do its job.
The need of the hour is fresh mandate for a new Constituent Assembly, not flogging a long-dead horse. The drama of the President issuing one deadline after another for consensus, without anything to show for it, must end. All that these fruitless deadlines are doing is steadily eroding the sanctity of the office of the President and eating away at the credibility of the entire political class.
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